Life Sciences no Longer Immune to Offshore Job Exodus
By MedZilla Staff Writer
Marysville, WA - October 8, 2004 -- Are companies in the
life sciences space taking their jobs offshore? This question
has people in many industries wondering if they might lose their
jobs because someone in another country would happily do them
for less money.
“Times are ripe for an offshore trend in biotech,”
says Frank Heasley, PhD, president and CEO of MedZilla.com, (www.medzilla.com)
a leading Internet recruitment and professional community that
serves biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and science.
“Our corporations are looking for less expensive labor, while
other countries that have as high or even higher educational standards
are fighting to keep their coveted researchers and scientists
and are focused on convincing our biotech companies to outsource
jobs to them.”
Another issue that could adversely affect jobs in the US biotech
industry, according to Dr. Heasley, is that of embryonic stem
cell funding.
The Bush administration, concerned with the destruction of human
embryos in the harvesting process, has limited governmental research
funding in the area of embryonic stem-cell research to only those
lines created before August 9, 2001. In the United States, there
are only 19 viable embryonic stem-cell lines that meet these requirements,
which is forcing stem-cell research to be out-sourced to countries
with less restrictive rules.
George Q. Daley, M.D., Ph.D., wrote in a perspective in the August
12, 2004 New England Journal of Medicine that some 128 new human
embryonic stem-cell lines have been produced worldwide since the
President’s announcement. The Bush administration's policy,
he believes, has severely curtailed opportunities for US scientists
to achieve technical advances with cell lines that have since
been established.
Look what is happening to information technology
“The life sciences have so far been deaf to the siren song
of outsourcing,” Richard Gallagher reported June 7, 2004
on www.The-Scientist.com. “But consider other professions:
chip-design teams, engineering firms, software development companies
and financial analysis offices are leaving to employ highly skilled
workers and enjoy substantial savings elsewhere. An estimated
3 million US white-collar jobs alone are slated to relocate to
developing countries. I suspect that the life sciences will go
the same way, sooner or later.”
In a May 5, 2004 article on Silicon.com, Charles Cooper reported
that more than 40% of US technology executives would be willing
to pay higher taxes to compensate for jobs they send offshore,
according to a nationwide poll by CNET News.com and Harris Interactive.
For the most part, the nearly 500 information technology decision
makers surveyed indicated that they accept global outsourcing
as a new reality and almost half of those surveyed agree that
the practice of offshore outsourcing is a natural part of the
evolution of a capitalistic society, according to Silicon.com
.
International workers can cost as little as a tenth of what it
costs to employ someone in the US, according to an article published
April 18, 2004 in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The signs are there
San Francisco Chronicle Reporter Bernadette Tamsey writes that
Bay Area companies such as Stanford University spin-off SRI International
and Genentech Inc have outsourcing deals.
Foreign governments are making it a priority to attract US biotech
business, offering access to highly trained workers and fully
equipped labs, according to the article.
To help avoid the possibility that overseas competition might
challenge California as the epicenter of innovation, California
firms are pressing the state government for tax incentives, improvements
in education and workforce development and increases in affordable
housing that would make it easier for biotech companies to locate
in the state, according to the Chronicle.
“We lead the world in biotech innovation right now, but
that can quickly change,” Dr. Heasley says. “The ongoing
loss of US jobs to foreign interests is hurting people who need
to work here. However, in the long term, the loss of those jobs
will also result in the loss of our ability to innovate in key
technical areas like biotechnology, computers and electronics.
It’s time to take steps to encourage the industry to keep
our jobs, and our technology, in the US.”
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